My apologies on taking so long to make a response. On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 10:39, Dr. Elmo wrote: > Jag wondered aloud: > >Add this to my list of reasons[0] why I wish English had a phonetic > >alphabet. > > Reasons why English shouldn't have a phonetic alphabet. > <snipped, will be brought back later> > > 2) English has a variety of dialects, so that you'd still have confusion, > e.g. with some people insisting that "cot" was spelled the same as "caught" > and others insisting they were clearly different. Interesting, although its also very common for people to change the spelling of words just to mimic a certain dialect. Take "Huckleberry Finn" for example (I kept thinking 'chile' was referring to the country when I first read that book in eight grade). It seems that more of your arguments boil down to a phonetic alphabet would be difficult to understand. Well, I'll state the claim that a phonetic alphabet would be no different from the spoken word, so any argument about why english is not good with a phonetic language, is an argument about why english is not good as a spoken language. And english seems to have served just fine as a spoken language for a good number of centuries. Jag